Introduction: Creative labour in East Asia

University of Groningen

Introduction

de Kloet, Jeroen; Lin, Jian; Chow, Yiufai

Global Media and China DOI:

10.1177/2059436420973411

IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below.

Document Version

Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record

Publication date: 2020

Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database

Citation for published version (APA):

de Kloet, J., Lin, J., & Chow, Y. (2020). Introduction: Creative labour in East Asia. Global Media and China, 5(4), 347-353. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436420973411

Copyright

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons).

Take-down policy

If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum.

https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436420973411

Global Media and China 2020, Vol. 5(4) 347–353

© The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/2059436420973411 journals.sagepub.com/home/gch

Creative Commons CC BY: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Introduction: Creative labour in

East Asia

Jeroen de Kloet

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Communication University of China, P.R.China

Jian Lin

University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Yiu Fai Chow

Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

Abstract

In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the creative industries discourse, and related debates around creative labour, continue to be haunted by a Eurocentric cum Anglocentric bias. The critical language of this discourse often directs all discussion of “inequality”, “precarity” and “self-exploitation” of creative labour towards a critique of “neoliberalism”, thus running the risk of overlooking different socio-political contexts. We point at the urgency to contextualize and globalize, if not decolonize, creative work studies, including the debates surrounding precarity. This special issue explores the nuanced situations of governance and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia.

Keywords

Creative Labour, East Asia, Precarity, Neoliberalism

The demand to be creative is haunting all forms of labour. Indeed, in a general sense, all human labour is potentially embodied with creativity (McGuigan, 2010, p. 324). In the past two decades, however, the circulation of capital has delimited creativity as a definitive feature that distinguishes certain occupations in the so-called creative industries. Policy makers around the globe embrace the ‘creative industries’ discourse and trumpet creative work for its bohemian spirit, autonomy and playfulness. Creativity has become a keyword globally, underpinning transformations of,

Corresponding author:

Jeroen de Kloet, University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Communication University of China, P.R.China.

Email: b.j.dekloet@uva.nl

348 Global Media and China 5(4) especially, cities towards a creative economy. All over the world, the word ‘creative’ is the favour-ite prefix for related terms like districts, hubs, incubators, makerspaces, factories and labs, to cfavour-ite just some of the globalized jargon currently en vogue. As Andreas Reckwitz (2017) writes, ‘Not to want to be creative [. . .] that would seem an absurd disposition’ (p. 1, author’s emphasis). Yet, the notion of creativity itself remains fluid and slippery. And as Oli Mould (2018) claims, ‘Contemporary society is formulated, operated and maintained with creativity as the core source of progress’ (p. 25). He argues, like Andreas Reckwitz and Angela McRobbie (2016), for an unbundling of creativ-ity, and creative labour, from its current capitalist logic.

Such critiques have noted that the real situation of creative work is not so much an ideal occupa-tion as a new precarious condioccupa-tion, in which creative workers suffer from problems such as short-term contracts, uncertain career paths, inadequate insurance and pension provisions, unequal earnings, and a lack of labour union solidarity and possibility (Curtin & Sanson, 2016; Deuze, 2009; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011; Lloyd, 2010). As these, and other, critics indicate, the absence of responses to these problems in current creative industry policies constitutes an intentional gov-ernmental tactic of neoliberalism, rendering creative practices and institutions governable within the doctrine of the free market economy (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009).

First coined by the British Labour Government in 1997 (Flew, 2012, p. 9), the creative indus-tries discourse, with adjustments and modifications, has been taken up by many counindus-tries around the world, underscoring their contribution to employment creation, economic growth as well as national export. In the original British context, this discourse signals British ‘New Labour’ govern-ment’s top-down approach on cultural economy. It aligns arts and media policies with economic policies and, more importantly, calls for more engagement of arts and media with the intellectual-property based information technology (Flew, 2012; Garnham, 2005).

This ‘creative industries’ approach arouses widespread critique. The conflation of arts with eco-nomic discourse ‘overrides important public good arguments for state support of culture, subsuming the cultural sector and cultural objectives within an economic agenda to which it is ill-suited’ (Galloway & Dunlop, 2007). The marketization of culture and Richard Florida’s recipe of ‘creative class’ run the risk of normalizing the precarious and neoliberal paradigm of labour condition (McGuigan, 2010; Ross, 2009). According to Nicolas Garnham (2005, p. 15), this policy strength-ens the intellectual-property protection, which benefits the major media conglomerates in the so-called copyright industries such as software, media and entertainment industries, and shifts the focus from distribution and consumption to creator human capital (promoting and aggregating the precari-ous employment condition). Creative industries, therefore, become a ‘Trojan horse, secreting the intellectual heritage of the information society and its technocratic baggage into the realm of cul-tural practice’, and align ‘it with inappropriate bedfellows such as business services, telecommuni-cations and calls for increases in generic creativity’ (Cunningham, 2009, p. 375).

Nonetheless, we should also acknowledge that the discourse of creative industries has been diversified and translated differently when it travels around different countries and regions. As Cunningham (2009, p. 376) points out, instead of being a ‘Trojan horse’, creative industries become ‘a Rorschach blot’: the take-up of creative industries policy varies in different parts of the world – Europe, the United States, Asia or Global South – and assembles different interests and explana-tory schema. For example, the top-down approach did not apply to the United States and some parts of Europe, where creative industries policies are mostly place-based, regional and municipal development strategies (Boix et al., 2016; Cunningham, 2009). Compared to British government’s emphasis on economic growth and information and communications technology (ICT) innovation, the European approach on creative industries generally ‘tend to stress a greater degree of

communitarian benefit and strategies of social inclusion’ (Cunningham, 2009, p. 378). Similarly, in poorer countries of the global South, their approach to creative economy often associate with poverty alleviation, cultural heritage as well as basic infrastructure (Cunningham, 2009).

Arguably, however, in most cases of the transnational diffusion of the ‘creative industries’ pol-icy, the ‘Trojan horse’ and the ‘Rorschach blot’ are nothing but the ‘different sides of the same coin’ – that either ‘economization of culture’ or the ‘culturalization of the economy’ tends to use market reasoning to dissociate culture and media from socio-political concerns (Hesmondhalgh, 2008; Lee, 2016). Within this policy context, professional creative work, especially those in mass media production such as film, television and music industries, has become increasingly subjected to the logic of market economy and capitalism.

This ‘creativity dispositif’ produces vast inequalities within global creative workplaces (Reckwitz, 2017). Gender, intersecting with race/ethnicity, age, (dis)ability and sexuality, results in various forms of occupational segregation and unequal access to creative work and its reward sys-tem (Banks, 2017). According to triumphalist claims about the ‘creative class’ and the ‘creative city’, the tolerance of cultural diversity and individual differences is crucial to cultivating creativity and a creative economy (Florida, 2002). Yet, the actual practices of the creative industries reinforce the marginalization of minorities and reproduce existing power relations and inequalities (Alacovska, 2017; Finkel et al., 2017). A number of individuals reap significant rewards from their creative labour, but a significant proportion of the population, for example, ethnic minorities and women, cannot gain access to the most prestigious sectors of the cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011, p. 232). Even Florida (2012) himself, in the second edition of The Rise of the Creative Class (p. 392), as well as in his later work (2018), admits that ‘a social safety net for the creative economy’ is needed to compensate the risks brought by ‘the flexible, hyper-individualized and contingent nature of work’ in creative economy.

Most of these claims are elaborated from the perspective of Euro-American ‘neoliberal’ creative industries. The critical language used often directs all discussion of ‘inequality’, ‘precarity’ and ‘self-exploitation’ of creative labour towards a critique of ‘neoliberalism’, thus running the risk of overlooking different socio-political contexts. As Alacovska and Gill (2019) note, ‘creative labour studies are notoriously centred on Euro-American metropolitan “creative hubs” and hence the creative worker they theorize is frequently white, middle-class, male and urban’ (p. 2). The global hierarchy of creative industries and the specific regional context of political economy often affect the condition of creative labour and make the discourse of creativity function in different ways (Fung, 2016; Lin, 2019). The account of the neoliberalization and precaritization of the social (Lorey, 2015) may not be pertinent to describing politico-economic conditions in non-western contexts such as Asia, Africa and Latin America. Different social realities also give rise to varia-tions in the discursive formation of cultural industries policy (Cunningham, 2009; Flew, 2013) and, consequently, in the actual labour conditions.

For example, in the case of China, culture and creativity are not only touted for ‘restructuring economy’, but also designated as instrument for wielding ‘soft power’ and maintaining social sta-bility (Keane, 2010). Yiu Fai Chow (2019, p. 17) also accentuates that the Chinese political context distinguishes the politics surrounding creative workers and women in China from those in western social-democratic societies. Severe state control and rampant capitalism dilute possibilities for effective activism or revolution. Whereas politics and individual resistance never stop emerging, they are trivialized and internalized into everyday work and life.

Chow also questions the limits of the idea of precarity. He asks in his study about creative female workers in Shanghai whether, ‘for these Chinese women, precarity is a human condition

350 Global Media and China 5(4) known to them, suitable for them, and available to them? Perhaps “precarity” is a male-centric and Western-centric notion?’ This inspires him to ‘argue for the limits of the politics of precarity, and to propose instead an ethics of care’ (Chow, 2019, p. 4). In a similar vein, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter (2008) argue that ‘[p]recarity appears as an irregular phenomenon only when set against a Fordist or Keynesian norm’ (p. 54). In other words, in many places around the world, including East Asia, it may well be precarity that is the norm, rather than exception. Provocatively, and speaking somewhat against Guy Standing’s (2016) work, they observe an increased disjuncture between academia and politics when they claim that ‘[t]he emergence of precarity as an object of academic analysis corresponds with its decline as a political concept motivating social movement activity’ (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008, p. 53). In the context of Japan, Shinji Oyama (2019) shows in his paper titled “Why do they not talk about creativity in Japanese creative industries?” how it are old, rather than new, media that hold most prestige in Japan, and are thus offering highly desirable job conditions. There, the demand to be creative and innovative features much less, as these are outsourced to young, freelance, and precarious labour. Creativity itself is thus managed quite dif-ferently in Japan.

In the light of this need to contextualize and globalize, if not decolonize, creative work studies, and with the debates surrounding precarity in its slipstream, this special issue explores the nuanced situations of governance and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia. How does the creativity dispositif function differently across different geo-political contexts, such as in East Asia? Instead of grouping all the creative labourers as ‘precariat’, how do creative practitioners from different social, political contexts experience precarity differently? Most importantly, how do these diverse creative workers respond to precarious life and work? If creative subjects always have a ‘future temporal orientation’ (Alacovska & Gill, 2019) that constantly motivates them to embrace precarity and self-exploitation, then it is also our goal to explore the differences and para-doxes of their imaginations and practices of future and hope. Precarity is only the starting point for such exploration.

This special issue

The article of Changwook Kim and Sangkyu Lee shows how, despite our discussion earlier, the issue of precarity continues to be relevant for studying creative labour. They show how the digital game industry in South Korea uses freelance workers in the industrial shift towards the mobile game market. The industry is highly fragmented, making a collective mobilization against pre-carious work conditions highly difficult. The workers are facing what the authors call an actually existing precarity, articulated in their interviews as a strong and deep sense of anxiety over one’s future. Underscoring their search for a better future, the authors argue to connect organized labour unions to unorganized creative workers. This will help to promote solidarity and resist fragmenta-tion and precarity. The authors thus not only add to our understanding of how precarity works in the context of South Korea; they also engage with thinking about future possibilities of collective mobilization.

Located in the increasing body of scholarship on K-wave – itself an inflection of the increasing regional and global relevance of this geocultural formation – the two subsequent contributions on K-pop turn their focus not on the industry professionals conventionally defined as creative work-ers. Instead, the authors, as guided by their empirical trajectory, have yielded two rich case studies that question the very notion of creative work and creative workers. Studying the Australian-based

The Academy, Kai Khiun Liew and Angle Lee, founder of the Academy, offer readers precious glimpses into the world of transnational K-pop dancing training. Through an analysis of training contents and trainee experiences, their work supplements the special issue in two interesting and important manners. First, by focusing on an institution (The Academy), that builds its business on the intersection between fan (re-creative) labour and aspirational (creative) labour, it has the poten-tial to enrich understanding of creative labour as such. Second, it has attempted to connect creative labour with issues of identity, which is refreshing.

Meichang Sun, building on her investigation of K-pop fans in mainland China, inserts fan labour as a form of creative labour. Her article documents and dissects the ways fans, or at least some of them, consider themselves and their (economic) activities essential to the sustained crea-tive and commercial vibrancy of K-pop; in that sense, Sun argues, they should be seen as creacrea-tive labour. This argument wedges open discussions on the relationship between fandom and creative industries as well as creative immaterial labour.

The remaining articles move back to what would conventionally be seen as creative workers themselves. The new employment opportunities generated by the creative economy are often char-acterized by flexibility and precarity, yet the actual experiences and consequences are highly diverse among various individuals. Qing Wang’s article explores such differentiations by zooming in on the experiences of Chinese female creative entrepreneurs in Shenzhen. Despite the increasing number of emerging women digital entrepreneurs, she argues that there is a constant difficulty to sustain a creative-based entrepreneurial identity. These female creative labourers face a constant devaluation of female entrepreneurship due to the hyper-competitive and masculinist forms of digital entrepreneurship and related technical fields, combined with traditional gender roles and family responsibility.

As illustrated in Ning Wei’s contribution, the Chinese state’s turn to a creative and digital econ-omy has led to the flexibilization of labour relations and the dismantling of traditional secure employment. The iron rice bowl has cracked once again. As a result, China’s younger generation is mobilized, this time not to fight traditional values, but to embrace the subjectivity of ‘slash youth’. This term refers to a contingent combination of multiple careers and conflation of both flexibility and uncertainty. As Wei argues, however, the actual experience of being slash youth is diverse and complicated, suggesting that slash youth are stratified, and they demonstrate a differ-entiated ability to translate uncertainties into opportunities under the condition of individualization and precaritization.

In the final article in this special issue, Lok Yee Wong and Yiu Fai Chow engage with creative workers that moved out of the industry. Drawing on the life histories of five creative workers in Hong Kong, they show how they got disillusioned and decided to quit. Four dimensions prove vital for this choice to move away from the creative industries: first, the increased level of precarity; second, a disillusionment with creativity as such; third, the urgency posed by aging; and fourth, the specific political situation of Hong Kong. These reasons of failure help, the authors argue, to broaden our framing of what constitutes precarity, away from sole economic and market-related factors to include other indicators.

Together, the articles in this special issue help to recast discussions on what constitutes precar-ity, the role of the nation-state and its policies, and the gendered and aged agency of creative labourers themselves. They all gesture towards the urgency to insert the East Asian experiences of creative labour into global debates over the creative industries – not only as another empirical case, but, more fundamentally, as a possible theoretical intervention. Just as the notion of creativity may

352 Global Media and China 5(4) operate differently in a non-Western context (see de Kloet et al., 2019), so does creative labour differ in different parts of the world. The urgency is to unleash the combined empirical and theo-retical potentials of these multiplicities of creative labour. This special issue is just a modest step into that direction, to truly and more powerfully speak back towards eurocentrically inflicted notions surrounding creativity, labour, precarity and agency; more work, from different parts of the world, needs to be done.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publica-tion of this article: This special issue is the result of a workshop held in Beijing from 16–18 May 2019 titled

Labouring Creativity in the Global Context. The workshop and this special issue are part of the ChinaCreative

project (http://chinacreative.humanities.uva.nl) that is funded by a consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC-2013-CoG 616882 – ChinaCreative). It was co-organized by University of Amsterdam, Beijing Normal University and Hong Kong Baptist University and hosted by I Project Space and Camera Stylo.

ORCID iDs

Jeroen de Kloet https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2314-5424 Jian Lin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0436-0858 Yiu Fai Chow https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6743-8339

References

Alacovska, A. (2017). The gendering power of genres: How female Scandinavian crime fiction writers expe-rience professional authorship. Organization, 24(3), 377–396.

Alacovska, A., & Gill, R. (2019). De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 22(2), 195–212.

Banks, M. (2017). Creative justice: Cultural industries, work and inequality. Rowman & Littlefield International.

Banks, M., & Hesmondhalgh, D. (2009). Looking for work in creative industries policy. International Journal

of Cultural Policy, 15(4), 415–430.

Boix, R., Capone, F., De Propris, L., Lazzeretti, L., & Sanchez, D. (2016). Comparing creative industries in Europe. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(4), 935–940.

Chow, Y. F. (2019). Caring in times of precarity: A study of single women doing creative work in Shanghai. Palgrave Macmillan.

Cunningham, S. (2009). Trojan horse or Rorschach blot? Creative industries around the world. International

Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(4), 375–386.

Curtin, M., & Sanson, K. (Eds.). (2016). Precarious creativity. University of California Press.

de Kloet, J., Chow, Y. F., & Scheen, L. (Eds.). (2019). Boredom, Shanzhai, and digitisation in the time of

creative China. Amsterdam University Press.

Deuze, M. (2009). Media industries, work and life. European Journal of Communication, 24(4), 467–480. Finkel, R., Jones, D., Sang, K., & Russell, D. S. (2017). Diversifying the creative: Creative work, creative

industries, creative identities. Organization, 24(3), 281–288. Flew, T. (2012). The creative industries: Culture and policy. SAGE. Flew, T. (2013). Global creative industries. Polity.

Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class: And how it’s transforming work, leisure, community, and

everyday life. Basis Books.

Florida, R. (2018). The new urban crisis: How our cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation,

and failing the middle class – And what we can do about it. Basis Books.

Fung, A. (2016). Redefining creative labour: East Asian comparisons. In M. Curtin & K. Sanson (Eds.),

Precarious creativity (pp. 200–214). University of California Press.

Galloway, S., & Dunlop, S. (2007). A critique of definitions of the cultural and creative industries in public policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 13(1), 17–31.

Garnham, N. (2005). From cultural to creative industries: An analysis of the implications of the ‘Creative Industries’ approach to arts and media policy making in the United Kingdom. International Journal of

Cultural Policy, 11(1), 15–29.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2008). Cultural and creative industries. In T. Bennett & J. Frow (Eds.), The SAGE

hand-book of cultural analysis (pp. 552–569). SAGE.

Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2011). Creative labour: Media work in three cultural industries. Routledge. Keane, M. (2010). Keeping up with the neighbors: China’s soft power ambitions. Cinema Journal, 49(3),

130–135.

Lee, C. K. (2016). Precarisation or empowerment? Reflections on recent labour unrest in China. The Journal

of Asian Studies, 75(2), 317–333.

Lin, J. (2019). Be creative for the state: Creative workers in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 22(1), 53–69.

Lloyd, R. (2010). Neo-Bohemia: Art and commerce in the postindustrial city. Routledge. Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso Books.

McGuigan, J. (2010). Creative labour, cultural work and individualisation. International Journal of Cultural

Policy, 16(3), 323–335.

McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Polity. Mould, O. (2018). Against creativity. Verso Books.

Neilson, B., & Rossiter, N. (2008). Precarity as a political concept, or, Fordism as exception. Theory, Culture

& Society, 25(7–8), 51–72.

Oyama, S. (2019, May 16-18). Why do they not talk about creativity in Japanese creative industries? Paper presented at workshop Labouring Creativity in the Global Context. Beijing.

Reckwitz, A. (2017). The invention of creativity. Polity.

Ross, A. (2009). Nice work if you can get it: Life and labor in precarious times. NYU Press. Standing, G. (2016). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury.

Author biographies

Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies and Head of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a professor at the State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, at the Communication University of China in Beijing. He co-edited Boredom, Shanzhai, and

Digitization in the Time of Creative China (with Yiu Fai Chow and Lena Scheen, Amsterdam UP 2019) and Trans-Asia as Method: Theory and Practices (with Yiu Fai Chow and Gladys Pak Lei Chong, Rowman and

Littlefield, 2019).

Jian Lin is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. His research interests include cultural industries and creative labour, social media influencer, platform studies and Chinese contemporary culture. His has co-authored (with David Craig and Stuart Cunningham) the monograph Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China (upcoming, Palgrave McMillan).

Yiu Fai Chow is associate professor at the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University. His publications cover gender politics and creative practices, including Caring in Times of

Precarity: A Study of Single Women Doing Creative Work in Shanghai (Palgrave 2019) and Sonic Multiplicities: Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image (Intellect 2013, co-authored).